“Sorry about the Food Analogy”—What’s Your Pleasure?

On first glance, Edward’s experience seems to be something entirely unique to members of his species, since it’s the smell of Bella Swan’s blood that arouses him and there’s nothing figurative about his desire to consume her. “Sorry about the food analogy,” he says to Bella when, in his clumsy attempt to explain his boorish behavior toward her on the day they meet, he ends up comparing her to ice cream.² Of course, for most of us this really would be no more than an analogy. The delectable eye candy sitting next to you in class wasn’t really a cupcake, and you probably didn’t literally want to take a bite out of the apple of your eye. But there’s something a bit disingenuous about Edward calling his food reference an “analogy,” since he really did want to make a meal of Bella.

Edward’s experience isn’t entirely strange to us, because erotic and romantic longings really do seem to share something in common with physical hunger. And who can doubt that this food analogy—the way that a vampire feeding on his victim can serve as a metaphor for an amorous conquest—accounts for a considerable part of the eroticism of vampire fiction? What else could it be? There’s nothing inherently sexy about being hundreds of years old (or even Edward’s more tender age of only one hundred and eighteen) and always maintaining the temperature of a corpse. But there is something undeniably erotic and intimate about the way a vampire feeds, not to mention the seductive animal magnetism he exudes, through which he effortlessly charms his victims into surrendering their wills and baring their throats. Of course, in the Twilight saga, it’s Bella who’s incessantly trying to wear down Edward’s rock-ribbed resistance. But the Cullen boy is a peculiarly honorable bloodsucker.

In any case, it can’t be an accident that the language of food offers such a rich and felicitous store of metaphors for describing our experience in the seemingly very different domain of sex and romance. No doubt this fact is in part because eating is one of life’s most intensely sensual pleasures. We delight in the appearance, aroma, and taste of our food. Our muscles engage in the agreeably sensuous activities of biting, chewing, and swallowing each tasty morsel. Once we’ve reduced our food to a pulp and pushed it down the esophagus, our contented stomach repays us for the boon via brain boost, radiating a feeling of profound satisfaction to the rest of the body. Each step of the process brings its own distinctive form of pleasure, so it’s with good reason that eating, along with drinking, is closely associated with being merry. For newborns, both human and vampire, the sensual pleasure of feeding offers us our earliest experience of gratification, securing a place for eating as one of our principle paradigms of deep carnal joy. And by a happy coincidence, eating is also the principal activity through which the joyful pulse of life’s vitality is sustained. We eat in obedience to the commands of nature, and nature rewards our obedience by making eating a genuine pleasure. Our sexual appetite is like this, too—nature’s need is our delight. In both hunger and erotic desire, the force of biology finds a powerful ally in the lure of pleasure.

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. The activity of eating ends up destroying the object of our enjoyment—or at least putting an end to its existence as an independently existing entity by transforming it into part of our own flesh. Lovers, on the other hand, never literally become one flesh, however tightly they cling to each other. Nonetheless, the world is full of predatory amorists who exploit others in much the same way the rest of us gobble down our meals, showing as little regard for the welfare of their partners as the lion shows for the lamb.

But even if we follow the chivalrous example of Edward—the lion who fell in love with the lamb—and recognize that our beloved has needs and interests of her own that set a limit to how far we can go in indulging our desires, it remains true that every form of sensual enjoyment resembles somewhat the pleasures of eating.³ Enjoyment is always a matter of “imbibing” or being “filled” with sensations that are essentially private or solitary in nature, even when the source of enjoyment is a shared activity like lovemaking. Moreover, we can get so swept up in a flood of pleasure that nothing beyond our present enjoyment seems to matter. Even gentlemanly Edward has to admit that his craving for Bella’s company is essentially selfish, motivated by a desire to feast on her beauty and fragrance, a voluptuous banquet for the sake of which he’s willing to put his beloved at mortal risk.⁴

**“What I Knew Was Right . . . and What I Wanted”**

The cover of the first book of the Twilight saga depicts outstretched hands cupping a bright red apple, bringing to mind another famous connection between the alimentary and the amorous that’s deeply embedded in Western consciousness. Most of us are familiar with the story of the Fall of Humanity found in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, which narrates how the first man and woman lost their original childlike innocence and were expelled from paradise as a result of disobeying God’s command not to eat the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The Bible, of course, never explicitly identifies the “forbidden fruit” as an apple. But perhaps because apples figured so prominently in Greek mythology as catalysts of desire and discord, someone must have assumed that an apple also was the most likely culprit in the Genesis story, and the idea stuck.⁵ The Bible also never directly implicates lust as a factor in the Fall. But that didn’t deter many early Christian theologians from insisting that the “knowledge of good and evil” imparted by the forbidden fruit had something to do with carnal knowledge , an interpretation supported by Adam and Eve’s sudden discovery of their nakedness upon partaking of the fruit.⁶ Consequently, forbidden desire has been associated ever since with taking a big juicy bite out of an apple.

When medieval Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) contemplated that apple, they believed it was alerting us to the dangers of what they called concupiscentia , or “concupiscence.” That was their word for the perfectly natural and spontaneous movement of desire toward pleasurable things, like food and sex. Of course, there’s nothing inherently bad about these objects of desire. In fact, Aquinas insisted they were necessary and good, but—and this is a crucial qualification—only as long as we seek them not solely for pleasure but rather for the sake of the purposes for which he believed God intended them, such as nourishing our bodies and reproducing the species. Allowed to operate outside the constraints of conscience and reason, concupiscent desires become tinder for sins like lust and gluttony. Aquinas classified concupiscence as a form of love, but distinguished it from friendly affection in that the object of concupiscence “is loved, not that any good may come to it, but that it may be possessed.”⁷ Our desire to eat is concupiscent since we are interested in only the nutrients and enjoyment we can take for ourselves. Erotic desires are concupiscent too, since they aim at our own pleasure.

Concupiscent desires are powerful, pleasurable, and—in the opinion of Aquinas and other Christian moralists—nothing but trouble when they come to dominate the personality. Not only do they incline us toward immoderate and harmful forms of self-indulgence, but when we start to view other people exclusively through the distorting lens of concupiscence, we end up reducing them to mere objects to be consumed or enjoyed. And that’s pretty much how we’re viewed by most vampires outside the Cullen clan. “Happy Meals on legs” is the description of human beings favored by Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer—another vampire partial to food analogies. ⁸ For a frightening picture of how Aquinas might have imagined pure, unbridled “concupiscence on legs,” we need only consider the newborn vampires depicted in Eclipse. They are, as Edward puts it, “[b]loodthirsty, wild, out of control.”⁹ If these frenzied, amoral appetites run amok are what desire tends to become when left unsupervised by our better rational nature, then let’s man those embattled ramparts of reason.

Edward found himself teetering atop those ramparts one night in Bella’s bedroom. Earlier that day he had discovered he had a potential rival in Mike Newton, and the resultant feelings of jealousy inflamed his desire for Bella to the point that breaking and entering seemed a reasonably good idea. That night he made his first of what were to become his nightly forays into Bella’s bedroom to spy on his beloved while she slept. He later explained to Bella what was going through his head that first night: “I wrestled all night, while watching you sleep, with the chasm between what I knew was right, moral, ethical, and what I wanted. I knew that if I continued to ignore you as I should, or if I left for a few years, till you were gone, that someday you would say yes to Mike, or someone like him.”¹⁰

We all know that it isn’t Mike Newton—or even someone very much like him—who would have claimed Bella’s heart if Edward hadn’t come along. But however mistaken Edward may have been about his competition, his wrenching internal struggle was very real. Aquinas undoubtedly would have described it as a battle between concupiscence (“what I wanted”) and conscience (“what I knew was right”). The tremendous power of concupiscence is demonstrated by the fact that hearing his name muttered by Bella in her sleep was all it took to persuade him to chuck conscience aside and go for the apple.

The Vampire Socrates

After all this talk about wanton appetites inducing us to do things that are stupid and wrong, we’re ready at last to make the acquaintance of Plato, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, to ponder the problem of desire. One of the big recurring themes of Plato’s philosophy was the phenomenon the Greeks knew as erôs, a word with a meaning that overlaps to some extent with the Latin concupiscentia but carries an even stronger connotation of irrationality. Erôs is the Greek word for passionate desire, typically, but not necessarily, sexual in nature and frequently associated with madness. For example, when the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (460-395 BCE) described the lust for the overseas empire that gripped the citizens of Athens when they set their sights on conquering the island of Sicily, he referred to it as their erôs, suggesting that this excessive passion crippled their judgment and led directly to their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war.¹¹

We might compare the Athenian’s foolhardy expedition to another—and particularly foul—expression of erôs that we encounter in the Twilight saga: James’s single-minded obsession with tracking and killing Bella, which also tempts him to engage in reckless behavior through which he courts his own ruin. Most often, erôs referred to the passion of being in love or to intense carnal lust. But as we learn from the examples of Edward, Bella, Jacob Black, Leah Clearwater, and other frequently unhappy residents of Forks and La Push, even the seemingly more benign forms of erôs can addle the mind and wreak havoc on the emotions.

No wonder, then, that some Greek thinkers regarded erôs as a menace. With the premium that philosophers place on reason and the reputation of erôs as a force of irrationality, we might expect the philosopher Plato to be among those cautioning us not to let erôs gain so much as a toehold in our souls. But au contraire! Plato, while never denying that erôs could be a form of madness, held the surprising view that madness wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, even claiming that “the greatest of all good things come to us through madness, provided the madness is divinely given.”¹² These are words that Plato attributed to Socrates (470-399 BCE), a fellow philosopher whom many believed exhibited more than a slight touch of madness himself and whom Plato featured as the principle interlocutor (or conversation partner) in all but a handful of the nearly three dozen philosophical dialogues that have been credited to him. In several of these dialogues—notably, the Phaedrus and the Symposium—passionate love is a chief topic of conversation, although erôs turns up as a subsidiary theme in many other places in the Platonic corpus, reflecting Plato’s conviction that any experience this overwhelming and universal must reveal something fundamental about the human condition.

Plato seems to have picked up his interest in erôs from Socrates, whom he quoted in one dialogue as claiming “to know nothing except the things of love”—in Greek, ta erôtica.¹³ Most books on ancient philosophy will tell you that Socrates was Plato’s teacher or mentor, but in fact their relationship seems to have been based on something much deeper, more mysterious, and perhaps even more erotic than that. It would be much closer to the truth to call Socrates il suo cantante, Plato’s singer, in the very same sense intended by the Volturi when they describe Bella to Edward as la tua cantante.¹⁴ For Socrates’ words sang to Plato—and not Plato alone—in the same enthralling accents as Bella’s blood sings to Edward. Not that Plato and Socrates were sleeping with each other. There’s no evidence that Socrates slept with any of the young men who swarmed around him to listen to his philosophical discussions, however much some of them may have desired that. In this respect, he appears to have been as chaste as Edward before taking his nuptial vows. As for Socrates’ young admirers, many of them must have felt just like Bella, awakened from the stupor of their humdrum existence by an encounter with a dazzlingly charismatic figure who seemed to many of them downright otherworldly.

One of these admirers was the handsome and roguish Alcibiades (450-404 BCE) who, despite being the most prominent and desirable man in all of Athens, was thoroughly besotted with love for Socrates. Plato described how poor Alcibiades felt so bewitched by Socrates that he accused him to his face of being like the flute-playing satyr Marsyas, a mythical creature whose music was said to leave his listeners spellbound. “You differ from him only in this,” Alcibiades told Socrates, “that you accomplish the same thing by bare words without instruments.”¹⁵ But the comparison is apt for more than just the way the impression made by Socrates’ words resembled the effect of the satyr’s legendary flute playing. Everyone agreed that Socrates’ appearance was remarkably, even alarmingly, satyr-like—which is to say he was an ugly old cuss! With his short stature, corpulent midsection, thick neck, bulging eyes, snub nose, and bald head, it’s unlikely that even vampire venom could have done much for his looks. But however ugly Socrates may have been on the outside, his devoted followers were filled with erôs for what they believed was his incomparably beautiful soul.

Although lacking the outer beauty and grace of vampires like the Cullens, Socrates still seemed like a bloodsucker to many. Even the nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who heard that old satyr’s flute calling across the centuries, wrote that Socrates was to his young admirers like a “vampire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so has fanned him cool, lulled him to sleep, and tormented him with troubling dreams.”¹⁶ But whether Socrates was an evil vampire depends on whom you ask. The families of some of his followers—his victims, if you prefer—watched with alarm as members of Socrates’ clique expressed their scorn for things such as honor, money, and political power—indeed for anything other than the pursuit of philosophical wisdom that Socrates advocated as the only thing worthwhile. But that’s just what erôs does to a person. Everything that isn’t associated with the beloved fades into insignificance. Just as Bella, after all that time spent in the company of immortals, couldn’t help but regard her school prom as “some trite human thing” despite what it meant to her human friends, so the lovers of Socrates tended to lose their taste for the things of the mundane world from which they believed Socrates had rescued them.¹⁷

In the minds of most respectable Athenians, the strange spell that the “vampire” Socrates cast on his followers provided ample confirmation that erôs is madness. But at the same time, it persuaded Plato that Socrates was right to claim that some forms of madness can be divine.

Lambs and the Predators Who Adore Them

Plato composed a dialogue titled the Phaedrus, named after the young man of that name whom Socrates engaged one day in a long conversation on the topic of erôs. Phaedrus has just read Socrates a speech written by the famous orator Lysias (445-380 BCE), who describes falling in love as a terrible sickness that enfeebles the judgment and causes those it afflicts to behave in a shameful manner. The lover is needy, controlling, easily wounded, unrealistic in his appraisal of his beloved’s merits, and prone to resentment when the affair ends. We might add that some lovers will even enter your house uninvited, spy on you while you sleep, read the minds of your friends, hold you prisoner, and drag you to the prom against your wishes. Headaches and complications are the best you can expect from a relationship with someone who loves you, according to Lysias. Consequently, he concludes that “[sexual] favors should be granted to one who is not in love with you rather than to one who is.”¹⁸ Take a more rational approach to hanky-panky and minimize the emotional risks by pairing off with a “sex buddy” instead of some dangerous madman who has fallen in love with you.

Phaedrus is bowled over by Lysias’s speech, but Socrates thinks it’s terrible—not just because of its morally dubious conclusion but also because he thinks it’s so poorly written and argued. After some goading by Phaedrus, Socrates reluctantly agrees to demonstrate how one could make a better argument—more clear, concise, and logical—on the same topic, composing his own rival speech denouncing love right there on the spot. His begins in a way that will sound familiar to us, distinguishing two contending forces that dwell within every human being, each of which would like to run the show.

One of them is our inborn desire for pleasure, the other an acquired opinion in pursuit of the best. Sometimes the two, lodged within us, agree; at other times they quarrel. Then sometimes one, sometimes the other gains the upper hand. When right opinion with reason rules and leads toward the best, we call this moderation. But when desire irrationally drags us toward pleasure and rules over us, we call this excess.¹⁹

Irrational desire for the pleasures of food is gluttony, irrational desire for wine is drunkenness, and irrational desire for some fetching beauty is erotic love. And just like the glutton and the drunk, the lover approaches the object of his desire as something to be consumed and enjoyed, heedless of how he may be harming the one he is using for his pleasure. Does that ring a bell? How about this? The lover is crazy about his beloved, Socrates concludes, in exactly the same way that “wolves adore lambs.”²⁰

We’ve heard it all before—concupiscence and conscience, predators and prey, the food analogy. Poor maligned erôs! Doesn’t anyone have anything nice to say about wild infatuation and smoldering passion? It turns out that Socrates does, after all.

Abruptly breaking off his speech in horror at his offense against the gods—he’s defamed erôs, one of their greatest gifts—he launches into a new speech. Recanting his blasphemies, he now offers a hymn in praise of erôs, lauding it as a “divine madness” through which the souls of lovers sprout wings that can carry them to the greatest heights, even to heaven, the abode of the gods. His speech in praise of erôs is a tour de force, recognized today as a classic in the literature of love for both its memorable metaphors and the serious philosophical ideas they impart. His basic insight seems to be that when we love rightly—more in a moment on what that means—some mortal being can become a window through which higher dimensions of reality shine forth. When we see some lovesick fool doting on some clumsy, weak, imperfect creature, lavishing on her (or him) adoration that only a god could deserve, we may think we’re witnessing an act of insanity. What we don’t realize is that this lover may be glimpsing something higher than meets our sensible and sober eyes, something that really is unconditionally lovable.

“Other Hungers . . . That Are Foreign to Me”

None of this sounds very scientific. But Socrates could respond that love is just one of those bewildering experiences that may in the end be impenetrable to scientific reason. That doesn’t imply we can’t say anything intelligent and meaningful about it, though. Where sterile argument and analysis fail, as perhaps they must when we’re dealing with something as unreasonable as love, Socrates resorts to mythmaking.

He thus invites us to imagine the soul as a chariot, driven by a charioteer and pulled by a team of two winged horses, one compliant and well-behaved, the other stubborn and unruly. Once upon a time, before we acquired our physical bodies, our souls dwelt in heaven, where they “banqueted upon” and were “nourished by”—there’s that food analogy again—the unspeakably marvelous sight of absolute moral and spiritual perfection, the likes of which are glimpsed only in a dim and shadowy way here on Earth.²¹ Here below in the physical realm we encounter many things that seem to be striving for perfection but never quite reach it. For example, justice is a virtue only imperfectly realized in some of our institutions, moderation something we are able to exercise only occasionally and imperfectly, and knowledge something we possess in only the most fallible and imperfect fashion.

Yet we must have some idea of perfection in order to be able to recognize these myriad forms of imperfection. Socrates’ myth suggests that our idea of perfection is a dim memory of our heavenly existence, when we both gazed and feasted on the ideal forms of justice, moderation, knowledge, and other divine realities that have only defective likenesses on earth. We would be feasting on those visions of perfection today if not for a series of grievous mishaps and blunders that caused us to lose our wings and fall to Earth, where we’re now imprisoned in needy and cumbersome bodies, forced to rely on defective senses that distract us from our memory of the grandeur we once beheld.

Socrates explains that in an imperfect world like ours, there’s little that could serve as a reminder of the brilliant spectacle of those perfect beings that once nourished our souls. Even with the acute senses of a vampire, we still wouldn’t be able to discern many traces of perfection here in this lower realm, where for the most part only imperfect things are visible. As Socrates observes, “There is no shine in the images here on earth of justice and moderation and the other things honorable for souls.”²² Lacking the splendor of their perfect heavenly counterparts, the imperfect instance of justice and moderation we encounter here on Earth doesn’t have the power to reawaken memories of the deep satisfaction and joy we experienced in heaven. And so that joy is forgotten—unless and until we fall in love. For there’s one form of perfection that shines in a way that even our feeble mortal senses can’t easily miss: beauty, especially the beauty that shines from some dazzling creature whose presence alone is enough to flood the soul with erotic and romantic longings.

In heaven the sight of unalloyed beauty, contemplated in its pure electrifying radiance, was “the most blest of the mysteries” we beheld.²³ But even after we fell to Earth, “we grasped it shining most clearly through the clearest of our senses, because sight is the sharpest of our physical senses.”²⁴ Socrates probably should have qualified that last statement, for while sight may be the sharpest sense for us mortal human beings, the sense of smell is the most acute for vampires. No surprise, then, that Edward’s powerful longings were awakened by a whiff, rather than the more common vision, of perfection. But regardless of whether it’s a beautiful form or a beautiful fragrance, beauty possesses a unique ability to remind us of a joy that lies beyond this world and therefore beyond mere carnal satisfactions.

But because the soul is complex—remember those two horses, one compliant, the other unruly—our reaction to the sight (or smell, in Edward’s case) of earthly beauty can be a tortured knot of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, the well-behaved horse is constrained by its sense of decency from pouncing straight away on that beautiful creature that looks (or smells) like a little piece of heaven. But the unruly horse feels no such restraint. It goes berserk and lurches forward, dragging the other horse and the charioteer along with it, all the while forcing them “to recall the delights of sex.” Only when they “see the darling’s face, flashing like a lightning bolt,” refreshing the memory of “beauty itself standing alongside moderation on a holy pedestal,” do the more orderly parts of the soul find the strength to restrain the rampaging lust of the unruly horse.²⁵ As Socrates describes it, the battle between the unruly horse and the other parts of the soul can be protracted and ugly, but if it ends with that misbehaving beast subdued, “the lover’s soul follows the darling with awe and a sense of shame.”²⁶

This strange myth unfolds one of the fundamental mysteries of love, how reverence for one’s beloved as a token of otherworldly perfection can cohabit with the most flagrantly carnal desires. To love rightly, on this account, is simply to get that unruly horse of carnal desire under control so that it doesn’t rob of us love’s most precious gift, the opening of a porthole through which fleeting glimpses of transcendent beauty can be spied. Edward knows this tension within the soul firsthand. “I wish you could feel the . . . complexity . . . the confusion . . . I feel,” he stammers to Bella.²⁷ “I’ve told you, on the one hand, the hunger—the thirst—that, deplorable creature that I am, I feel for you. And I think you can understand that, to an extent . . . But . . . there are other hungers. Hungers I don’t understand, that are foreign to me.”²⁸

Carnal lust is a desire to feast our senses on the voluptuous pleasures promised by the beloved’s beautiful flesh, form, and in some cases fragrance. We know exactly what it would mean to sate that sort of desire. But Edward’s experience of other, more mysterious “hungers” points to another, more mysterious feast and to satisfactions that reach us through channels other than the senses. Socrates’ myth gives us a language for describing those satisfactions—feasting at a heavenly banquet on the pure forms of moral and spiritual perfection—but it’s a poetic and metaphoric language that dispels none of the mystery of the experience of love.

“A Moonless Night”

But there’s another aspect of Socrates’ myth that we must not overlook. That boiling cauldron of lust that Socrates depicts as an unruly horse is the very thing that rouses the soul to approach the beloved in the first place! Without that troublemaking scalawag called concupiscent desire, no one would ever draw close enough to mortal beauty to detect within it intimations of something higher. Consequently, our lives would be like Edward’s before he got his first whiff of Bella—sane, sober, and steady. Our lives would be “like a moonless night” with little “points of light and reason” but never a meteor flashing across the sky, dazzling us out of our listless complacency, and awakening strange longings.²⁹

Traditional moralists may have a point when they urge us to be wary of our carnal appetites, especially if our appetites turn out to be anything like Edward’s. But Socrates’ myth suggests that we should be grateful for them as well. No doubt Edward is relieved that he could muster enough self-control to resist that “deplorable” hunger that nearly trampled his good sense and morals into the dirt that fateful day in biology class. But, having defeated the beast that wanted to consume Bella there on the spot, he’s probably still very glad that it was there in the beginning to call his attention to the girl who smelled good enough to eat.

NOTES

1 Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. by Graham Parkes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 36.

2 Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), p. 267.

3 Ibid., p. 274.

4 Ibid., p. 266.

5 For example, when Paris of Troy judged a beauty contest among three goddesses, Aphrodite, Hera and Athena, he declared Aphrodite the winner and awarded her a golden apple. The other goddesses were such sore losers that they incited the Trojan War and brought about the destruction of Troy. Consider also the role of apples in the myths of Atalanta and the Garden of the Hesperides.

6 See Elaine Pagels, Adam and Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 27-28.

7 The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, Volume One, trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Paris: Christian Classics, 1981), p. 299 (Pt. 1, Q. 60, Art. 3).